Arnt Karlsen <arnt@???> wrote:

>> What a pity there isn't a visual indicator that you are weilding root
>> authority like, I don't know, maybe the bash shell prompt ending
>> character changing from "$" to "#".
>>
>> It could work. Somebody should try it, some time.

:D

> ..I still miss and prefer the S.u.S.E.-5.2 way, root had a
> nice red background color in xterms, fairly hard to miss.

Back when I adminned a bunch of Macs serving individual services, I set the desktop to be a repeating tile of the application icon so it was clear which one I was connected to at any time. Many times over the years I suggested to my Windows admin colleagues that they should set the desktop to show which server it is - and so avoid the "oops I <did something> to the wrong one" incidents that happened from time to time - but they never listened.

More recently, I've only really done CLI stuff and then the hostname is right there as part of the Bash prompt.